LOS MOTZ EL SO - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Library ...

Abstract
Although the poems of the troubadours have been extensively studied almost since they
were first composed and the troubadours themselves indicate that they tried to create interactions
between the melodies and the words, the melodies and the interactions between the poems and
melodies in the complete songs have been examined much less intensively. In this dissertation I
delve into the songs of the late twelfth-century troubadour Folquet de Marseille whose thirteen
songs surviving with their melodies provide a varied collection of a suitable size to permit
intensive analysis of poetic and musical compositional practices and the interactions between the
two.
A medieval grammatical theory for understanding texts, a theory which encompasses and
links the verbal and musical texts, provides the thread of continuity. I first examine the poetic
parameters: the versification, division of the words into sense units, and proverbs. Next, I
analyze the pitch organization of the melodies and the division of the stanza into musical units
based on repetition. Finally, I locate the interactions between the versification and melodic
repetition and between the musical and verbal units. In the process of developing methods for
examining the words and melodies in these terms I evaluated and reconciled many medieval and
some modern theories on verbal and musical organization.
Through this scrutiny of Folquet’s poems and melodies as combined into songs I found
his songs to be creatively and carefully organized. The poetic and melodic parameters cannot be
understood in isolation, but only through the interactions of the poems and melodies. Poetic and
musical units combine flexibly so that monotony is avoided and coherence achieved as the same
melody is sung for five or six stanzas of words. The musical settings of the proverbs underscore
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